Tuberculosis remains one of the top infectious disease killers worldwide, a challenge amplified by drug-resistant forms of the disease. Now, in a major step forward, an international clinical trial has found three new safe and effective drug regimens for tuberculosis that is resistant to rifampin, the most effective of the first-line antibiotics used to treat TB. The research, published Jan. 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine, was led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and other members of the endTB project, ...

Rutgers Health researchers have found that a weekly injection of diabetes medication could replace painful daily hormone shots for people with a rare genetic form of lipodystrophy that leaves patients with almost zero fat tissue, according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine. Congenital generalized lipodystrophy (CGL), which affects only a few thousand people worldwide, results in severe metabolic disease, diabetes, insulin resistance and reduced life expectancy. With no fat tissue for proper storage, fat accumulates in organs ...

DALLAS, January 29, 2025 — When someone’s heart stops pumping, early CPR can save their life.[1] New survey research from the American Heart Association reveals more Americans are prepared to provide that lifesaving rhythm for their friends, family and community. The newly released data, conducted by Decision Analyst on behalf of the American Heart Association, indicates more U.S. adults now say they feel ready to handle and respond to a cardiac arrest[2]. When Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field during Monday Night Football in January ...

Research led by the University of Michigan arrived at a surprisingly unsurprising result while assessing the sustainability gap between public transit and services like Uber and Lyft, formally known as transport network companies or TNCs. With data collected by the city of Chicago, the researchers studied people's use of TNCs over transit, allowing the team to put a value on the time riders saved with their choices. The median value of that number, about $34 per hour, was virtually identical to the Chicago region’s median hourly wage. "I was a bit surprised that our median ...

Neurons may get all the glory, but they would be nothing without glial cells. While brain cells do the heavy lifting in the nervous system, it’s the glia that provide nutrients, clean up waste, and protect neurons from harm. Now, scientists have discovered a new mechanism by which these crucial supporting players detect and respond to neuron damage. Published in Nature Communications, the study describes how two key proteins allow glial cells to actively monitor the hair-like cilia that extend out of nematode dendrites, so that the glial cells can respond ...

Abdominal pain is among the most common reasons children are taken to the emergency department. A small proportion of them usually have appendicitis, and timely detection is essential. To do so, clinicians often rely on imaging, such as ultrasound or CT scans. Although delayed diagnosis of appendicitis in children can be life threatening, overtesting is wasteful and can even cause harm. Now in a study, published in Academic Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan researchers found that emergency departments vary widely in how they balance the ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a new optical sensor that provides a simple way to achieve real-time detection of extremely low levels of arsenic in water. The technology could enable household testing for arsenic, empowering individuals to monitor their own water quality. Arsenic contamination is a serious environmental and public health challenge affecting millions of people around the world. This contamination occurs when natural geological processes release arsenic from rocks and soil into groundwater ...

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the influence of the forces exerted by the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq on how much the surface of the Earth has bent over the last 20 million years. Their research revealed that in the present day, deep below the Earth’s surface, the Neotethys oceanic plate – the ocean floor that used to be between the Arabian and Eurasian continents – is breaking off horizontally, with a tear progressively ...

Hebrew SeniorLife and Healthworks Community Fitness have partnered to offer on-site fitness programs at senior living communities across the Boston metro area. Hebrew SeniorLife, the largest nonprofit provider of senior services in New England, will offer the services through its Right Care, Right Place, Right Time Initiative (R3), which embeds wellness teams into affordable senior housing communities. Recently, Healthworks Community Fitness launched a new program called Get Movin’, an 8 – 12 week fitness program delivered on-site to senior living communities ...

Across cosmic history, powerful forces have acted on matter, reshaping the universe into an increasingly complex web of structures. Now, new research led by Joshua Kim and Mathew Madhavacheril at the University of Pennsylvania and their collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests our universe has become “messier and more complicated” over the roughly 13.8 billion years it’s been around, or rather, the distribution of matter over the years is less “clumpy” ...

Imagine being at a big marquee event at an arena, like the Super Bowl, with the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, and a sea of jerseys all merging into one chaotic blur. While the frenzied, exciting environment certainly enhances your viewing experience, it can also make it difficult to find the people you came with if you get separated. If you’re communicating by phone or waving from the stands, it can be an exhausting game of hide-and-seek amid the noise and commotion. Now imagine if you had ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2025 MINNEAPOLIS — Older adults whose cholesterol changes over time may be more likely to develop dementia than people whose cholesterol is stable, regardless of the actual cholesterol level, according to a study published in the January 29, 2025, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that changing cholesterol causes dementia; it only shows an association. “These results suggest that fluctuating cholesterol, measured annually, may be a new biomarker for identifying ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A home robot trained to perform household tasks in a factory may fail to effectively scrub the sink or take out the trash when deployed in a user’s kitchen, since this new environment differs from its training space. To avoid this, engineers often try to match the simulated training environment as closely as possible with the real world where the agent will be deployed. However, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have now found that, despite this conventional wisdom, sometimes training in a completely different environment yields a better-performing artificial intelligence agent. Their results indicate that, in some situations, training a simulated ...

It’s a place where few living things can survive in the water. Deep in the world’s largest rainforest, there is a boiling river. Found in eastern central Peru, it is a small tributary that eventually leads to the Amazon River. Heated by cracks in the Earth’s crust, at its warmest spots, the water can reach 200 degrees Fahrenheit, an inhospitable environment with air temperatures hotter than anywhere else in the Amazon. But the steamy river, known locally as “Shanay-Timpishka,” which translates as “boiled with the heat of the ...

ROCHESTER, Minnesota — Mayo Clinic researchers have developed organoid models to study uveal melanoma, one of the most common types of eye cancer in adults. Their goal is to use these models to better understand how this disease works and develop treatments for unmet patient needs.  Organoids are 3D models grown from patient tissue that accurately reflect a patient's unique genetic and biological characteristics, also known as "avatars." When derived from a patient's cancer tumor, an organoid will behave and respond to treatments outside the body in a lab (in vitro) just like the original tumor would inside the body (in vivo).  In 50% of patients, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Turning environmental waste into useful chemical resources could solve many of the inevitable challenges of our growing amounts of discarded plastics, paper and food waste, according to new research.  In a significant breakthrough, researchers from The Ohio State University have developed a technology to transform materials like plastics and agricultural waste into syngas, a substance most often used to create chemicals and fuels like formaldehyde and methanol.  Using simulations to test how well the system could break down waste, scientists found that their approach, called ...

Working dogs take a day to adjust to the change in routine caused by Daylight Savings Time, whereas pet dogs and their owners seem to be unaffected, according to a study publishing January 29, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Lavania Nagendran, Ming Fei Li and colleagues at the University of Toronto, Canada. Daylight Savings Time (DST) is used by many countries to maintain the alignment between daylight hours and human activity patterns, by setting clocks forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the autumn. Previous research has shown that DST can disrupt ...

In a new linguistic analysis, reviews of movies with female-dominated casts were found to have significantly higher levels of sexism than reviews of movies with male-dominated casts. Jad Doughman and Wael Khreich of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One, on January 29, 2025. Prior research suggests that negative movie reviews can affect actors’ finances, career paths, and mental well-being, while also influencing the broader media landscape. However, studies of gender bias in reviews have traditionally relied on movie ratings or box-office ...

When exercising in gyms, women face barriers across various domains, including physical appearance and body image, gym attire, the physical gym environment, and interactions with others, according to a study published January 29, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Emma Cowley from the SHE Research Centre, TUS, Ireland, and Jekaterina Schneider from the University of the West of England, U.K. Exercise significantly improves physical, mental, and psychosocial health. Recent research indicates that women who engage in regular exercise experience greater health benefits than men, including lower incidence of all-cause mortality and reduced ...

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Professor Kyu-Jin Cho (Director of the Soft Robotics Research Center) from the Department of Mechanical Engineering took inspiration from principles found in nature and developed the "Hyperelastic Torque Reversal Mechanism (HeTRM)," which enables robots made from rubber-like soft materials to perform rapid and powerful movements. This study was published in the prestigious international journal Science Robotics on January 29.   The mantis shrimp delivers a punch ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 19:00 GMT / 14:00 ET, WEDNESDAY 29 JANUARY 2025 Quantum-inspired computing drives major advance in simulating turbulence Researchers at the University of Oxford have pioneered a new approach to simulate turbulent systems, based on probabilities. The findings have been published today (29 January) in the journal Science Advances. Predicting the dynamics of turbulent fluid flows has long been a central goal for scientists and engineers. Yet, even with modern computing technology, direct and accurate simulation of all but the simplest turbulent flows remains impossible. This is due to turbulence being ...

Light and electron microscopy have distinct limitations. Light microscopy makes it difficult to resolve smaller and smaller features, and electron microscopy resolves small structures, but samples must be meticulously prepared, killing any live specimens. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a technique originally developed to assess the physical and mechanical properties of materials at extremely high resolutions, but the imaging speeds aren’t fast enough (e.g. several minutes per frame) to capture relevant data for living biological samples. In contrast, another method, high-speed AFM (HS-AFM), is fast but cannot measure mechanical properties. Understanding ...

An international team of scientists has discovered the anti-icing secret of polar bear fur – something that allows one of the planet’s most iconic animals to survive and thrive in one of its most punishing climates. That secret? Greasy hair. After some polar sleuthing, which involved scrutiny of hair collected from six polar bears in the wild, the scientists homed in on the hair “sebum” (or grease) as the all-important protectant. This sebum, which is made up of cholesterol, diacylglycerols, and fatty acids, makes it very hard for ice to attach to their fur.  While this finding ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Many materials store information about what has happened to them in a sort of material memory, like wrinkles on a once crumpled piece of paper. Now, a team led by Penn State physicists has uncovered how, under specific conditions, some materials seemingly violate underlying mathematics to store memories about the sequence of previous deformations. According to the researchers, the method, described in a paper appearing today (Jan. 29) in the journal Science Advances, could inspire new ways to store information in ...

[Vienna, 29.01.2025]—A recent study evaluating the NewsGuard database, a leading media reliability rating service, has found no evidence supporting the allegation that NewsGuard is biased against conservative news outlets. Actually, the results suggest it’s unlikely that NewsGuard has an inherent bias in how it selects or rates right-leaning sources in the US, where trustworthiness is especially low. “It seems unlikely that NewsGuard has an inherent bias against conservative sources, both in selecting and giving them lower ratings. Instead, the US media system is flooded with right-wing sources that tend to not adhere to professional ...